Companies Agree to Cross Equity Investment worth a Total of $10 million
Amadeus Global Travel Distribution SA (Madrid: AMS) and BroadVision Inc. (Nasdaq: BVSN, Neuer Mrkt: BDN) have entered into a strategic alliance to develop a global online travel booking application that will power a new generation of personalised e-commerce travel services. BroadVision is a leading provider of personalised e-business applications and Amadeus is a leading global travel reservations and technology solutions provider. The companies have also agreed in principle to a limited equity cross participation.
The companies have set up a joint competency centre at BroadVision`s headquarters in California to develop, market and support this joint initiative on a worldwide basis. Combining their experience and skills in the travel and personalised e-commerce sectors, they will target existing clients, as well as new ventures looking to establish online booking facilities or travel portals, ranging from airlines, dot-com start-ups to established corporations moving online.
“Our experience providing e-commerce software and services for some of the world`s largest consumer and business-to-business travel sites places us in a leadership position for bringing a unique application solution for the travel service industry to market,” says Dr. Pehong Chen, BroadVision`s President and CEO.
This latest announcement follows the news that the two companies are also involved in a joint venture with Bank of America and Hewlett-Packard, supplying business-to-employee travel and other services to employees` desktops using BroadVision`s personalised e-business applications and Amadeus` online travel booking platform.
The new e-commerce travel product will be the first application of its kind to allow travel professionals to dynamically apply personalised client profile criteria, which allow true one-to-one travel offers to customers and will lead to new levels of customer loyalty and retention. The product, which will launch later this summer, is designed to enable the two companies to take a leading share of the growing worldwide travel services market across the business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-employee (B2E) sectors.
The e-commerce travel product will be based on the BroadVision One-To-One Enterprise platform which powers the company`s full suite of applications, and Amadeus` web-based reservation products, which are currently used by several leading dot-coms, as well as 90 airline web sites and over 3,000 travel agencies and hotel chains.
Says Ildefonso Arenas, managing director of the Amadeus and Terra Lycos online travel company and a joint customer of BroadVision and Amadeus: “Building close, personalised relationships with consumers is a key competitive differentiator for online travel sites today. We are very excited about the innovative solution provided by BroadVision and Amadeus as it will allow us to differentiate our offering and thereby acquire and retain valuable customers in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking markets when we launch our travel site in the next few weeks.”
Amadeus, with over 370 million bookings in 1999, is the leading global travel reservations and technology solutions provider, supporting travel professionals around the world with online distribution, marketing and sales tools. Amadeus` web reservation platform provides users with access to its database, allowing real-time bookings with over 500 airlines, 51,000 hotels and 48 car rental companies. Through its partnership with BroadVision, the company is now looking to migrate its offering to a fully personalised Internet service, where powerful, transaction-based facilities can be accessed through its customers` web sites.
BroadVision will bring to bear its experience in providing personalised e-business solutions to offer a high level of personalisation and customisation to customer sites, so that the end user will be able to access information and services that are appropriate to their specific needs.
José Antonio Tazón, president and CEO of Amadeus, concludes: “The exponential growth of e-commerce in the travel arena means that both current and potential Amadeus web reservation platform customers are now looking to implement the next generation of personalised e-commerce tools that will enable them to consistently attract and maintain valuable customers. Combining BroadVision`s leadership in personalised e-commerce with Amadeus` expertise as an enabler of e-commerce for the travel industry, will result in a compelling solution that will address these requirements.”——-